Let's begin with Power Point and some considerations in using it. For this we will use the work of Edward Tufte including these works:

Power Point is Evil. This is an article from WIRED magazine, September 2003. In this article Tufte explains how the use of Power Point, potentially and frequently, erodes the real point of the presentation and masks information the reader needs. This is a very important article for anyone using Power Point!

Now here's a lecture we put together for you on Power Point and Tufte's position related to its application in cognition and communications. This lecture and the included links should help you understand what Tufte is saying about the use and misuse of Power Point in terms of how things are communicated as well as how they are stored cognitively. This is important for you as a user of Power Point as well as for anyone who actually teaches the use of Power Point. The concern is that the technology over powers, over states and/or obscures the real information. Go through this lecture and these materials, as well as links in the course reader, and consider HOW you are using Power Point and also how you are asking or might ask your students to use it, given the view of Tufte.

Podcasts and RSS

Begin by reading the chapter on Podcasting and RSS written by Dr. McFadden and published in The Handbook on Research in Computer-mediated Communications (2008). This chapter will serve as your lecture on this topic, providing information as to what IS a podcast, what IS what we call RSS and how these relate to teaching and learning.

Then once ou have that theoretical and conceptual background from the lecture, you are going to learn to make a podcast with Audacity, the particular free tool we have chosen for you to use -- unless you have Garage Band or some other podcast tool you already use and prefer or that is recommended by your school. Start the process of thinking about applying podcasts to your own teaching by watching this multimedia presentation/lecture by Dr. McFadden: Technology, MP3's and Podcasts go to School*.*Multimedia - use your headset/earphones